In her essay “This Imaginary Half-Nothing: Time” (#10 on this list), poet Anne Boyer quotes another poet, John Donne: “We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew, and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work.” What happens when that long work is disrupted, when an irregularity appears? What if the irregularity is chronic, terminal, fatal? Here, I’ve collected 10 stories about authors reckoning with illnesses—some without cause or cure.

“Radiation. Government conspiracy. Mass hysteria. There are plenty of theories as to why the residents of a tiny Kazakh mining region keep falling asleep for days at a time, but no answers. BuzzFeed News spends a week there and tries to stay awake.”

“I like to hate-read wrenching cancer-scare stories, about how someone found a lump—but it wasn’t actually cancer, and the entire experience changed her forever! Now she eats kale salads and appreciates hummingbirds.”

Deanna Pai, 25-year-old beauty editor at Cosmo, gives a frank, first-person account what it’s like to undergo chemotherapy for a rare liver cancer.

It sounds like science fiction: A select number of people living in close proximity to wind-powered turbines are suffering disturbing, chronic symptoms. (If you like this story, I recommend “The Devil’s Bait” by Leslie Jamison. There are thematic similarities.)

With movies like The Fault in Our Stars and Me & Earl & the Dying Girl and the short-lived television show Red Band Society, dying has never been so popular. These are harmful fictions, explains Lillie Lainoff, who was diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) when she was just 14. Her experiences in hospitals stand in direct contradiction to the romanticization of illness in YA books, film and television.

“If I keep my head down and don’t ask for too much from life, fate might forget about me and not send anything else bad my way. There are other times when I want fate to notice me. I want to live a big life with my big voice and big personality. There is no one way to be sick. There is not even one way to be sick during the course of a day.”

When i was in middle school, I was paranoid about asphyxiating due to an unknown food allergy, that I’d tried to swallow and my throat would be closed. This essay brought back those memories, but my fears are nothing compared to Kristen Hanley Cardozo’s reality. For three months, her vocal cords shut down—she couldn’t breathe or speak—and she suffered from terrible bodily weakness.

“I have tended since early boyhood to deal with loss — losing people dear to me — by turning to the nonhuman. When I was sent away to a boarding school as a child of 6, at the outset of the Second World War, numbers became my friends; when I returned to London at 10, the elements and the periodic table became my companions. Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.

And now, at this juncture, when death is no longer an abstract concept, but a presence — an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence — I am again surrounding myself, as I did when I was a boy, with metals and minerals, little emblems of eternity.”

Get the Longreads Weekly Email

We want to dramatically increase our story fund this year, but we can't do it without your support. Every dollar you contribute goes to writers and publishers who spend hours, weeks, and months reporting and writing outstanding stories. Now is the time to join us.